What happens to something you told someone in confidence once you no longer care if anyone knows? Especially if, to their mind, you still want it locked away.
I’m thinking of secrets I’ve told people in the past (high school, college) that I wouldn’t care at all, now, if people knew them. Or things that people told me that I doubt they care about keeping private anymore (not that I would chance it…I’m no monster). If you’re the keeper of secrets for people you’re no longer close with–i.e. people who you conjecture, but don’t know/can’t confirm, no longer consider those things “secrets”–then the information is orphaned.
Maybe it’s just that it’s not in common parlance anymore, but the term “orphaned” only makes me think of Microsoft Word with its widowed paragraphs and orphaned sentences. First of all–what grim terminology! (though I kind of appreciate that aspect of it). Second: the analogy doesn’t hold up. A woman becoming a widow (and where, yes, are the widower paragraphs?) has nothing to do with a child becoming an orphan (unless there’s an alternate definition of orphan that derives from losing one parent?)
In word processing, they are similarly only related in theme (the death of your full paragraph!):
“Picture a paragraph that starts at the bottom of one page and continues at the top of the next page. When only the last line of the paragraph appears at the top of the next page, that line is called a widow. When only the first line of the paragraph appears at the bottom of the first page, that line is called an orphan.”
This would seem to counteract my complaint that widows and orphans, though related, don’t happen at the same time…because a widowed paragraph and an orphaned paragraph can’t happen at the same time (unless you are verbose enough to have paragraphs that take up just over one page). Still, what’s the justification for designating one widow and the other orphan? And why isn’t there a term for the blank line (which is anathema to me; I would much rather have a single line of a paragraph at either top or bottom, though to be honest I would ultimately prefer to go back and add or delete so that this can all be avoided completely) that Word puts in when it acts to prevent widows and orphans?
This website cautions,
“Be aware that if you use widow and orphan control, you will frequently see blank lines at the bottom of your pages. This is normal, since lines must be transplanted to cure the problem.”
Though the author didn’t create the widow/orphan function in Word, the language he uses–“transplanted,” “cure”–settles neatly into the governing analogy.
At some point, surely, this issue of blank space at the bottom of a page will be obsolete (or hang on only tenuously, the way the convention of using two spaces after a period has sustained). In the sense that the internet exists and a “page” is a continuous scroll, it already has.
Where do my old secrets live–bottom of someone’s consciousness, about to be pushed out? At the top, barely visible, away from the main narrative? I don’t care whether the whispered thoughts I’ve collected from people over the years are the widows and my former secrets are the orphans, or if it’s the other way around. What I think about is that blank line at the bottom of the page (because unlike widowed or orphaned text, the blank line only ever occurs at the bottom), the space that reminds me of people I no longer know, whose confidences I still hold, but who are no longer present enough in my life to tell me whether they still treasure them as secrets. Time and distance: the real causes of blank space.
